Basis of architectural survey between Geometry and Representation. A first educative approach

In the contemporary world, in Europe and specifically in Italy, the Architect gets in contact with a highly stratified urban and territorial context, which is characterized by the presence of a considerable amount of existing building (and heritage). Making clear that the Architect is increasingly working on existing buildings, it is mandatory to open a constructive dialogue with it. This makes it necessary for him to gain knowledge – being it metric, material, technological – of such artefacts before being able to work ‘on’ it. This process takes place through that set of operations, not only technical but also theoretical, which are grouped together under the name of Survey (Ippolito 2016). Thanks to new technologies, survey has been recognized for years as an integrated process of several different techniques and software (e.g. direct measuring with meters, laser-meters, levels; and indirect measuring range/image based). This paper illustrates the learning process – aimed at aforementioned themes – we propose to the architecture students in the first year, as part of the Design and Survey Laboratory (bachelor’s degree in Architecture). The primary focus of the Laboratory is to guide students in studying and using the graphic languages and related fundamental tools, bases both to the phase of the conception of new architectures and of analysis existing building. In this case, architectural Survey comes as a cognitive tool of fundamental importance for the analysis and understanding of the architectural artefact. In this sense, the main objective of the exercises carried out during the Laboratory is to prepare the student by a gradual theoretical and technical path for the direct and indirect operations of survey of a building. During the first semester the course includes a first operation of surveying an architectural drawing (during the exercise of critical redraw of an edited project), giving birth to an ideal scalar approach to the themes of survey, both manual (direct survey) and digital (SP, SfM), which combines and develops horizontal skills (in parallel with the first year Composition Atelier/Technology Laboratory) and vertical ones during the second year of study, the activity of the Geomatics Laboratory. We discuss here the main passages of the path of survey as introduced in the first year through the discussion of an emblematic example from Turin. It flows from the identification of the object, the study of the project drawings, the direct and indirect survey and its representations in order to comprehend and communicate built Architecture.